June 4, 2006 Lansdowne, Virginia On June 4, Burnett and Williams participated in the annual Walk to Cure Diabetes, sponsored by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Our team raised money for juvenile diabetes research and also got some good exercise…
By Alan Cooper , from the Virginia Lawyers Weekly journal
The Supreme Court of Virginia has decided to stay away from the distinction between physical and emotional injuries that it announced in “Kondaurov v. Kerdasha” in November.
The court took the extremely unusual step of vacating that opinion after Eve Kerdasha’s attorneys contended in a petition for rehearing that her emotional hypersensitivity was not an issue until Senior Justice Charles S. Russell raised it in his opinion for the court.
The court granted the petition, and on April 21 Russell again sent the case back to Arlington County Circuit Court for a new trial on damages.
But the new opinion contains little of the language that plaintiffs’ attorneys found so distressing in the first one.
In a discussion in the November opinion that found a plaintiff’s instruction to be improper, Russell analogized Kerdasha’s circumstances to cases in which a plaintiff suffers physical injury as the result of emotional distress.
Because of “the fear of fraudulent and exaggerated claims easily asserted and difficult to refute,” Russell said, Virginia and other states have allowed recovery only when a defendant was aware of a plaintiff’s unusual sensitivity and acted outrageously as a result of that knowledge.
Jim Williams gave a presentation on "duty of good faith" at the April 21, 2006 CLE Seminar on Handling Insurance Law Matters in Virginia. In conjunction with his role as a faculty member at this seminar, Jim was also one…
We are excited and pleased to announce the addition of a new personal injury litigator, C. James Williams, III. Jim is a highly regarded attorney who fits perfectly with our vision for the future of the firm. He is a summa cum laude graduate of George Mason University School of Law and a former clerk to United States District Court Judge Glen M. Williams. He practiced at Gentry, Locke, Rakes, and Moore in Roanoke and at Morris & Morris in Richmond before becoming litigation counsel for Progressive Insurance Company. In 1999, Jim left defense and coverage work and began representing injured plaintiffs. A veteran litigator, he has tried more than one hundred personal injury jury trials and was appellate counsel in Virginia’s leading scientific evidence case, Titsworth v. Robinson. He is a regular contributor of law journal articles on personal injury law and litigation issues. Jim’s wealth of experience in insurance coverage matters provides added expertise in an insurance environment that becomes more complex each year. We are thrilled that he has joined the firm as an attorney and principal, and we look forward to the opportunity to introduce him to you.
One of our firm’s core values is social responsibility. The growth and success of our firm is meaningless if we do not use what we have learned to help our community. Starting in Spring 2006, we will be launching a campaign in association with TeachSafe, a non-profit organization, to share our collective knowledge with others in order to prevent injury and encourage safety. As a personal injury firm, we deal with injured people every day and know a lot about the hardships they face. While not all accidents are preventable, we feel an obligation to do what we can to help people avoid injury in their lives. In addition to our safety campaign, the attorneys and staff in our firm give their time and resources to better the community.
April 2006 There is no shortage of bad press when it comes to lawyers. Unfortunately a few bad apples do a pretty good job rotting the entire barrel. It is even more unfortunate that the public is usually unaware of…
February 2006 In July 2005, a new section of law was added to the Virginia Code that changes the environment for medical malpractice legislation. One of the major changes is the new requirement of a “Certification of Expert Witness Opinion”…